Mike Carroll, Naked Filmmaking: How to Make a Feature-Length Film - Without a Crew - for $6,000 or Less.

Naked Filmmaking: How to Make a Feature-Length Film - Without a Crew - for $10,000  $6,000 or Less, Revised and Expanded for DSLR Filmmakers

Reading Mike Carroll's book, Naked Filmmaking. He takes the view that, with digital video, you can work without a crew. Which seems perfectly reasonable. He was and still is a news cameraman so that's his forte.

He has a few suggestions, like working short hours so you don't have to provide food to your cast and any crew you might have.

To recruit a cast, he says to just find a local actor, show him the script and offer him or her a role. Then the actor will suggest other actors to play the other parts.

Carroll is a much more serious person than I am. He suggests buying the latest prosumer camera to shoot the movie, then selling it as soon as you're done while it's still worth something and he discusses the importance of good quality sound recording.

He calls for relatively short features - 75 minutes. If you're making a movie without money, I would go even shorter. He says the shorter running time makes movies more attractive to film festivals.

For nude scenes, promise your actors they'll see the scene first and if they don't like it, you won't use it. I'm amazed you can get unpaid actors to do nude scenes.

Use actors who'll let you use their houses as locations. He tells how he got his first job as news cameraman by leaving the big city and finding a TV station in a smaller market, and how he then approached learning the job. TV stations had switched from film to video and he knew nothing about it. It sounded like he was the very last person they wanted at a TV station in Kansas. He got the job because no one else wanted to live there.

It seems more useful than other books of its type. It's serious but doesn't call for you to spend tens of thousands of dollars.

Available in paperback or on Kindle from Amazon.